Black Ops 2 developer says that they've tried to predict the near-future of warfare




By William Colvin


694349 black ops ii

Two thirds of Black Ops II's storyline is set in 2025. Picture: Courtesy of Treyarch

FOR a long time, games studio Treyarch had been making World War Two games under the Call of Duty banner, while fellow Activision stablemate Infinity Ward were having all the fun (and glory) with their Modern Warfare version of the franchise.
But Call of Duty: Black Ops took Treyarch’s version of the series into a new era – with a conspiracy-heavy plot that revolved around ‘deniable operations’ in the Cold War, starring major Hollywood actors like Sam Worthington, Ed Harris and Gary Oldman.

The next instalment, Black Ops 2, is just as much of a jump – most of the game takes place in 2025.

In the past, Treyarch have been able to meticulously research the weapons, environments and politics of the wars that they’re putting players into. But how does a developer go about researching the wars of the future?

“We met a gentleman named Peter Warren Singer, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C - he’s an expert in drone warfare and advanced robotics, and it also so happens that he advises political leaders on long-range policy planning issues,” says John Rafacz, Treyarch’s director of communications, in an interview with News.com.au.


“His point of view was really invaluable when it came to creating this plausible, fictional world.

“What was interesting about our work with Singer was that when we went to him at first, it was really more about technology and weapons, and he really helped us understand the direction of warfare, and what that would look like.

“But then, we started to realise when we were talking to him, that he had some points of view and information that could really help us to understand what the geo-political landscape will look like.

“When you go back to the first Cold War, there are these issues playing out on the world stage – there’s this superpower struggle between the US and the Soviet Union, there’s tension over petroleum.

Rafacz says that a major discovery for the team was that the scarcity of rare earth elements, such as Scandium and Dysprosium, could be a major cause of future conflicts.

“When we talked to Singer, we found that a plausible tension for 2025 is the struggle over rare earth elements.

“Rare earth elements are critical ingredients to all of our daily lives, whether we know it or not. Each one of us has a smart phone, an iPad or a laptop. Rare earth elements are critical ingredients in all of those things.

“It also happens that they’re critical ingredients in things like stealth technology, and a lot of the weapons that are being prototyped now.

“That’s a tension that kind of takes place in the background of the game, but what happens in the foreground is, because these ingredients are so integral to the technologies upon which near future militaries rely, we have a villain named Raoul Menendez, who hatches a plan to hijack that military infrastructure, and turn all of those strengths against us.



Surprisingly, Rafacz says that often times the experts told them that their outlandish ideas weren’t quite outlandish enough.

“We asked Peter Singer – we laid out the blue-prints on the table and said ‘here’s what we’re thinking. Are we going too far with this?’

“And to our surprise, often times he told us that we weren’t going far enough.

“Everything in the game... there may be some creative license that we take with ideas. But everything that you see in the game is either in use, or has been prototyped, or is kind of out there in the world in some way, shape or form.”

The first Black Ops game’s storyline and performance were generally well-received by critics, but many took issue with a perceived lack of interactivity. Put simply, people didn’t feel like their actions had any real impact on the gameplay. One YouTube video even shows a player running forwards through a level for 15 minutes without firing a single shot.

But Rafacz says that they've done their best to address the criticisms.

“A lot of people have their own opinions, and there are tools like Twitter which allow everyone to share those opinions with you.

“There’s a real art to listening, and if you understand how to listen and develop a thick skin, and you wade into the waters of the Twittersphere, there’s a lot to be learned about what people are really asking for.

He says that Black Ops 2’s ‘Strike Force’ levels are part of that – they’re all about giving players the choice and impact over the game’s outcomes that they’ve been wanting.

“Strike Force levels aren’t even new to Black Ops, they’re new to Call of Duty. At several points throughout the single-player campaign, the head of Special Operations will come to you and inform you that there’s this flashpoint, this conflict happening somewhere in the world, and you’re being called upon to achieve an objective.

“This is where we take the player off of a linear story-telling progression, and drop them into a sandbox. But we do it in a way that still has meaning to the outcome of the story.

“When you’re inserted into the action, there are objectives that you must achieve. But we give the player the control to take control of any one of their squad members, to take control of any one of the advanced robotics or drones, or even go into an overwatch mode and set waypoints and issue commands to the other members of the squad.

“You can succeed, or fail at one of these ‘Strike Force’ levels, and that’s one of the interesting things here.

“In the linear campaign, if you fail, you just go back to the checkpoint and try again, and make it through.

“But with the Strike Force levels, if you play through the game and succeed at all of yours, and I play through the game and fail at all of mine, the fiction that wraps the ending of your story is going to be a little different than mine.

“When you combine that with a couple of key decisions that we’re asking players to make throughout the single-player campaign, it’s entirely possible that there are characters that might live in your ending, that might not make it into mine.

“There’s this idea that outcomes can be different, which is unique for Call of Duty.”

But Black Ops 2 is still a Call of Duty game. Rafacz says that they’re certainly not straying into the realms of high science-fiction.

“A Call of Duty game is not laser beams and aliens – it was very important to us to retain that feel.

“In doing so, we kind of stuck with these projectile-based weapons instead of energy-based weapons – we’re not pulling a Star Wars here.

“But the projectile-based weapons are very much rooted in things that players find familiar.

“Once we had that grounding, we were able to look at prototypes as well as existing weapons. There are weapons that are out there, like the 50. Calibre machine gun, that have been around since like 1918, that are still in use today.

"There are certain technologies that weave through history that we’ve been able to incorporate to retain that Call of Duty feel.”

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 will be available for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC on the 13th of November, 2012.